


Go Turn A Deeper Blue

by Siamesa



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Multi, Platonic Soulmates, Romantic Soulmates, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 23:03:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6259636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siamesa/pseuds/Siamesa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A soulmate is poor luck.  Too many colors drive men mad.  </p>
<p>It’s best, everyone says, to find them over a lifetime...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Go Turn A Deeper Blue

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Go Turn A Deeper Blue - Обратно в синюю бездну](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12443931) by [Altra_Realta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Altra_Realta/pseuds/Altra_Realta)



i.

Ned tells her about Robert.  Her quiet brother, almost a stranger by now, paints a picture in the air of the other stranger she will wed.

“He says he’s seeing colors already, Lya.  Just by thinking of you.”

It’s meant to reassure her.  It does the opposite.  She trusts no one who could make Ned lie.  If Robert Baratheon sees colors, it’s for some girl in the Vale, and she tells her brother so.

“His parents were soulmates.”  This, almost apologetic.

“I’m not his.”  She turns her back.  She wishes Robert would come to the tourney, just so he could see her and know every truth she does.

“He’s a good man.  You’ll find them together –“

“Go away, Ned.” 

A soulmate is poor luck. 

Too many colors drive men mad.  It’s best, everyone says, to find them over a lifetime.  One on her wedding night, one for each child she bears.  Some men find them in battle, and children can be born with them.  Maybe, just maybe, if her plan tomorrow bears fruit, she’ll look out her visor and see a fallen man’s standard blossom into purple or green. 

Maybe that will make Robert Baratheon bearable.

In two days, she sits, still bruised, and watches the last of the riders.  In two days, she knows that roses are _blue_ and eyes can be _violet._   In two days, the world is bright and mad and beautiful.

In a year, she is dead.

ii.

The colors don’t fade.

They ought to, she thinks.  They ought to have fled from her the moment Ned fell.  But a leaf falls to the ground, and it is gold and brown and red for all she tries to will it into gray.

She remembers their first morning.

She’d always known blue, but he’d been born with nothing.  Starks always were.   In the light of that first dawn, he’d told her that her hair was red.

His voice had broken with the wonder of it.

She’d learned red, herself, in the highlights of Robb’s hair, as she’d waited for her husband to return.  She’d imagined that she’d see a dozen new colors on as he rode through the gates.  Perhaps she would have, had he not been carrying the bastard.

_He’d still only had red._   She shakes herself, with the memory of it.  It doesn’t matter now.

 

The gold of the sunlight is the candles in her sept, the sept that Ned had built for her, the apology he’d never said out loud.  The ground turning to dark mud beneath her feet is _his_ hair, when he’d come back to her from the battles on Pyke.  He’d first seen blue in Sansa’s eyes.  She’d first seen green on a ride in the Wolfswood.

Somewhere, in the lion’s jaws, her Sansa’s eyes are _blue like yours_ , her Arya’s cheeks are pink with rage or cold _._   Color after color snaps in the wind as her son marches to war. 

Each one a memory.  Each one a cruel jest, come to mock her pain.

It is mercy, then, or almost, when she awakens on the riverbank, and all the world is _red red red._

iii.

If not the moment they meet, then soon after.

Loras and Renly lay in the garden, and give all the flowers new names.  Explosions of red and yellow, purple and orange, all woven amongst his old familiar green.  He asks Renly what color he was born with.

“Gold.”  A smile of wonder.  “You have gold flecks in your eyes.”

“A sign,” says Loras.  He’s sure of it.  They’re soulmates, after all.  “Your eyes are blue.”

“Mother told me.”  He looks up at the cascade of flowers again.  “Father planted this garden for her.  They were soulmates, too.”

Renly’s parents had drowned.

“It’s not a curse,” says Loras.  “It’s beautiful.  And – and you’re beautiful.”  He’s called a hundred girls and dogs and flowers beautiful before today.  He’d been a child, but now he’s almost a man grown, and now he knows what beauty is.

And besides, there’s something glorious about lives twined together, even in secret, even bound for madness, death and ruin.  It’s romantic in a way no song could ever capture.

As the years go by, he jousts in capes of flowers.  Renly wears gaudy capes and jewels, and they laugh at the poor souls who don’t even know the colors clash.

Even on the eve of battle, Renly gives his Kingsguard colors, their colors.  Brienne the Blue (lucky enough to win the shade of Renly’s eyes, unlucky enough not to know it) stands guard outside the tent where Renly sleeps.

Loras stands guard in a more personal manner.  He watches the lamplight play on Renly’s sleeping face, his eyelids flickering in dream.

_No madness,_ he thinks.  _No madness, and no ruin either._

iv.

He was born with colors.  From his earliest memories, he knew that Cersei’s eyes were green, that her hair was gold, that her mouth was red and pink as she laughed.

She was born with colors, too.  She _was_ the colors.

He had been five years old, the first time.  His Lord Father had taken him on a short progress, to show off the heir to the Westerlands.  A league passed, and the hills swallowed Casterly Rock.

And the world went grey.

It hadn’t happened to her.  Weeks later, when the colors blossomed back, he’d leapt from his horse and to his sister, pressing questions into her ears.

“It’s only fair,” she’d told him, years later, when Aerys called him to the Guard.  “You get everything else.  If I have to sit in a chamber while you ride and fight and go to court, I ought to at least keep my colors!”

“I’m sorry,” he’d said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the first apologies he’d ever meant.  He’d kissed her.

The world is grey, now, in this miserable cell, even when the sunlight creeps in, even when some Northern bastard comes to taunt him.  Months have passed without a spark of gold or green.

And when he pictures her, when he closes his eyes and curls his fists and tries his best to forget the hard stone and reeking straw – when he pictures her, now, even her eyes are grey.

Lady Catelyn is grey, for all her famous red hair, and the hulking woman beside her greyer still.  The forest is grey, and the river.

And then he rears up, gasping, from a shallow creek, readying another insult, and the drops of water all around him shiver.

Brienne of Tarth is grey.  But her eyes are blue.

v.

She watches every sundown.

Cold nights in Braavos, reflecting ponds in Pentos, the slow birthing of stars out on the Dothraki Sea.  She waits, each time, for the moment, the burst of colors that she can neither name nor hold.

Violet lingers.  Violet has lingered since that night, bare moons and an eternity ago, when her sun-and-stars had been beside her.

He’d seen it, too.  _Our son will see it, too._

But Khal Drogo is dead, and their child is dead, and the last of the sunlight has gone.  Hints of purple play along the coals beneath her feet.  The sound of screaming fades.  The world goes bright.

Claws catch at her bare skin.

The world seems to sparkle strangely now, hazy from the heat.  The last of the coals still burn, and torchlight plays across staring faces, shining eyes.

By the glow of the stars, Dany sees her children, scales gleaming black and white, sparkling red and green and gold.

vi.

Davos has always known the sea.

It shines, gray and green and brown.  To the South, the depths are clear and blue, but when One-Eye Wat tells him the sky is the same, he looks up and sees nothing.

The first time he sees her, Marya has a ribbon in her hair, bright green against the grey of Flea Bottom. 

He bribes and borrows, she slips away from her father, and he takes her out in a skiff, until his arms ache from rowing and the mud of the harbor gives way to true water.

“ _Blackwater,_ ” she says with a laugh.  “It’s green, too.”

“Green and brown,” she tells him after their wedding, and runs her fingers through his hair.  _Blue,_ when Dale is born, and he climbs with his son to the rickety roof just to stare at the sky.

The sea is black in truth when he sails into Shipbreaker Bay.  They run so close to a Redwyne ship that he can hear her beams creak, but the night pulls them past in safety.  Storm’s End stands waiting, and he swallows a mad smile.  It’s a mad gamble, this, but he has nothing better to do with onions, and starving men surely have nothing better to do with their gold.

“A smuggler.”

Men stare at him in wonder, like he once stared at a green ribbon.  Only the young lord’s eyes are narrowed.  Around him, the night air shimmers and twists.

Days twist and shimmer, too, colors as fleeting as reflections on the sea.  And then he stands, his hand pressed to the table, willing himself not to flinch, willing himself not to look away.

The cleaver falls.  The blood is red.

And Davos Seaworth knows his fate.

 


End file.
